Great scenes and effects, but ... I wished the colors of the scenes would fit them together in a better way. These scenes would have made 2-3 great demos in different styles, but as one demo they are too different for my taste. Anyway, all of them look awesome, so ... thumb up.

Woah. Just woah. I was laying on the back, just by the bigscreen with some friends. When your prod was playing on, I thought “How the fuck did they do the cars?!”. Seriously, the whole thing : fantastic.

Precalc for a relatively long time and then crash. Second start, the precalc was nearly instantaneous and crash. Turned off riva tuner statistic server and closed Fraps, still crash. Reboot, crash. Aero is off. Every other imaginable demos from POUET run just fine on this rig:

When watching I expected it to end at any time, because how could you have that much content that looked so good? But even though they revisited locations it just kept going, and going ... and then *bam* the greetings with some fresh visuals which were just amazing.

A lot of things to nitpick, but I'm glad that this is finally THE intro that really puts those "mercury-shaders" to actual use. An intro that manages to surprise with new content in every turn, and keeps it enjoyable on multiple levels.

I don't know where to start, because this is so great. Direction, music everything perfectly fits. Technically impressive (those underwater lensflares and city light scene at the end !). Quite long but never boring. I would give a cdc if i could. It also runs quite smootly on my old GTX560 card, which is not unpleasant. Good job guys !

Fantastic! The marble stuff looked kinda bad in full light (especially the floor), but apart from that, truly great stuff. Literal jaw drop during the city traffic / greetings scene, which is one of the best scenes I've seen regardless of size limit. The short nod to inception was also nice, sort of wish you had done more of that.

This was really cool! The best scenes are by far the "from-the-Still-playbook"-scenes (complete with color gradients and particles in the air), which makes those marble-scenes feel entirely out-of-place. A good direction from beginning to end would have benefitted this prod a lot, but still: when it shines it looks holy shit-good!

Finally, after several years, a 64k impresses me.
I like both the visuals and the tricks but, as someone else already noted, the storyline wasn't completely clear (honestly, if there's one, I didn't get it).
Anyway, good job! :)

Love the night scene in the city with the lights, overall awesome! Though some effects/scenes are not as consistent and nice visually as some others (e.g the marble doesn't look good). Music gives a good demoscene feeling, liked it. Congrats!

a good 64k (in the current pond of really bad 64ks) - so well deserving of a big positive thumb.

but on the flip side, here's some objective criticism: bad direction, weak 3d scenes, dodgy lighting (whats up with your contact shadows/occlusion?), highly derivative content, nothing-concept (isnt it just random scenes?), slow, pretentious, bad framerate issues in places on a 680, some parts looking strangely low res (the city), dull soundtrack - all trying to hide behind a ridiculous amount of lens flare, huge glow and overshot dof.
the timesquare part works well though - probably because it plays to the strengths of the engine (i.e. tons of glow, and no lighting to worry about..).

i think ive said this about the last few mercury prods now but ill say it again - if mercury could direct, had good concepts and good scene content they could really deliver something special. as it is, it just always falls short of greatness.

I think it was cupe who said in the stream that there was room for improvement still and I would agree. All the scenes felt very separate even if they had a similar theme(timeless buildings right?), but it didn't feel that way overall. Switching between scenes just didn't seem to be that smooth, if you know what I mean. Also the scene were you had the infinite hallway with the pillars felt very plain, it needed more color, stronger shadows and variation(too much repeating patterns to me atleast). The city scene had quite a lot of brown and green color, I'm not a big expert on colors but I would say it didn't work that well.

But overall this production looked technically frickin awesome. It had a lot of stuff crammed into it. Models looked really great and I really enjoy the bokeh stuff, also the camera movement was near perfect.

As usual with something that impressive you would want to go even further and fix small issues (i.e. too much lens-flares, rendering/lighting artifacts), however, its still way above most 64k intros out there!

Some people hinted that I might love this. And it's impossible not to :-) The technology and colors are just breathtaking. There is no question that Mercury is now the solid leader in PC post-processing and color-grading... Jesus - I'm so jealous!

But on the other hand... There is still sooooo much potential in this one. I don't agree with all things smash said, but still: I can't believe you did this. I'm going to have nightmares on dreaming about retiming it. It would have been so easy to drastically improve its impact by leaving out a couple of scenes, arranging the order to tell a little story, aligning the pace the to music and tweaking some camera perspectives. I beg you to make a final. Study TBL: how they take so lala content and just by presenting (or should I say "selling it") perfectly, they lift their stuff to an entire different league. If you would add a grain of TBL to your stuff, most of your serious release might end up in the top 10. This one might even without, but compared to "Debris" I assume will quickly loose its impact over the years.

But hey: That's all criticizing something that already a million levels above the average demoscene level (and including myself). So, I'm quiet humbled by being greeting! (And please don't stop to do so :-) )

Btw: Shame that you couldn't give your seminar on color-grading. Would have fitted perfectly. Looks like I finally have to tackle this topic more seriously.

Really, really, really awesome. This one'll go down in scene history.
Please, though, after you guys get some rest and time away, come back and make a final! This demo deserves to be remembered in super-polished form!

Very random scenes, which don't seem connected at all. A little bit of effort / direction could have elevated this one way above what it actually achieved. But damn, still great music, superb greetings scene and overall great scenes that look amazing.

I don't quite get the massive hype (or people are this desperate for good 64k's, dunno :), it's just a solid tech show. A really good one at that, but unfortunately it falls short in all the departments that would make it memorable.

+1 for a final version: I wish it was shorter, more consistent, with less reuse of the same thing over and over with just a small change here and there, also make the marble less 'default POV 1.0 material' (dirty would be cool).

i don't know.. somehow left me cold.
i liked the ocean wave stuff best.
sure a lot of work has gone into this, and there's lots of nice tech here. but then there's so much cheesy and pretentious stuff..
next time more style and less posing please :)

I really like the physicality of the rendering. The fact that there appears to be an atmosphere with dust, flares, all that stuff. That's nice. Some of the scenes are also lovely, but most of them are really not that interesting to look at (the 'daytime' cityscape, the church) imho.

The lack of direction really hurts this intro. I hope the next Mercury release will have a designer looking at it and throwing out 50% of the stuff, so what remains is a tight, gorgeous-looking production. Without that marble texture.

Anyway, it's still miles better than the rest of the 64k's that get released nowadays, so thumb :)

Absolutely spectacular scenes! Love the ocean waves, the cathedral windows, the twisting paths, the night cityscape. And the music breathes a nice coating of threatening atmosphere to it all. Just awesome!

Of course this deserves a thumb up for the visuals. Except maybe for the marble scenes, this looks amazing! And the city at night scene with the "faked" cars is clever and awesome! Although at one point you can clearly see detached lights at close distance which somewhat breaks the illusion, but that's the only lapse.

Too bad the demo lacks cohesion and a clearer concept. I showed this to my (non-demoscener) wife, and her reaction was "look nice, but what has the first scene to do with the second or the following? Is it random?"...

totally awesome! you're creating a mysterious world full of beauty. the epic soundrack does grat support building the athmosphere. i especially liked the ligning and shadowplay as well as the gorgeous night city scene.
i only wish it would run on my amd graphics-card.

There is a little bit of everything I hate in 90% of demoscene productions. Reusing scenes. Showing off your texture generator. Camera path that feels like the camera has no weight. Natural scenes that feels off. Thanks god there is no saturated whites.
It might be technically good, I don't know, and I don't care, it left me completely cold because I was annoyed by those typical problems.

We have just updated the file in the archive with workarounds for two bugs that the nvidia 337.50 beta driver introduces. I'd recommend not using this driver version :)
(This is not the final, we've just started working on it). Except for the workarounds it's exactly the same as the partyversion.

Code, colours, music, direction. It all felt epic. It's actually amazing that there is room for improvement in content and effects given how wonderful this is already. The 'Time Square' part was astonishing and raised the whole intro another level. Top ten.

this is so impressive! i love the waves, the little "inception"-reference and those marble textures. great music (thank you! you did not ruin the intro with wobwob to the max) and great variety. the greetings part is a class of its own. i actually would have also thumbed it up if it had 20mb. but 64k? I actually feel bad that I only can thumb it up once. i know where my next cdc goes to.

Very nice rendering, lots of details in the rendering engine. You guys did a fantastic job of putting current graphics style and tech in a 64k demo. I was also surprised how well it ran on my machine considering my video card is only average.

Fixes include a few technical and performance things as well as many small and not so small aesthetic changes.

Get it from here or watch the high-res video. Download links on pouet should be updated soon and a youtube upload will follow.

We have reasons to believe that the final version will run on some future AMD driver since we have fixed our bugs and AMD has acknowledged issues in their driver that prevent it from running. Sorry, not yet.

Thanks for the final! I look forward to watching it in realtime on my AMD soon!
Direction-wise i really love pixturs re-edit. It does a great job in creating that mysterious athmosphere the imagenary is screaming for.

im glad to see technology wise how much 64k's have been improved since .dot product by farbrausch.

positives: - title and music - ocean water and out of focus hexagon lenses - (most of textures) and 3d-objects - city part - one outdoor scene and the last indoor scene -

critics: - direction wise: includes ambiance of some of the scenes (might be the colors, or might be how the textures are used) - switching to much between the scenes - should have sticked to three or four individual parts and make them blend more smoothly together imho.

still think this is an good 64k-technology show, and dont think the people behind it put that much effort in making the direction look good (unless they wanted it to be like that). i think they made alot of effort puting this together even, so thumbs up.

Interestingly, the initial awe from the year ago when I saw this intro the first time has given place to a more neutral, somewhat critical evaluation I'm approaching it now. That being said, it's still an A+ for effort. Just wish it left more of an impact.